Ah, the joys of business...

The joys are few, but the responsibilities and hassles are many!

One of the most interesting things has been dealing with suppliers. The AyrMesh Hub is a radio we buy from Ubiquiti, via one or more of their distributors. Ubiquiti is a pretty good company: they design really good stuff that's inexpensive and fairly bulletproof. However, they have a very difficult time managing their own supply chain, and the result has been that they just run out of product every so often.

Their distribution model somewhat exacerbates this: they manufacture in China, and their distributors have to buy in full container (roughly 20'x8'x8') lots. This is a LOT of little radios, and a LOT of capital tied up in them, so they manage their inventory so it's just about empty when the next container load comes in. If Ubiquiti is a couple of weeks late (due to a manufacturing glitch, or a facility problem, or parts unavailable, or any of a zillion other things that go wrong), then these products just disappear out of everyone's inventory as everyone who uses them scrambles to get them.

To this point, we have been lucky - the two times they have run out of product, we have been able to get enough inventory to tide us over, but it has been both expensive and nerve-wracking.

The other major "supplier" hassle has been web hosting... a critical "commodity" for a web-based business.

We have two websites: ayrstone.com, which runs Joomla and is all content-based, and ayrmesh.com, which is the "backbone" of the AyrMesh system and is all code-based. Ayrmesh.com, because of the nature of the information, also is dependent on SSL encryption - all connections must be SSL encrypted.

We started off with GoDaddy, and it worked pretty well. We had a couple of short outages, but, through our early days, it worked just fine. The only problem I had with GoDaddy is their clunky interface for managing all the functions of the website. It is terribly slow, not very convenient, and, every so often, it just wouldn't work (possibly because it is Javascript-heavy and will tax the browser to the max). I also found it worked best with Windows and IE, but I use Linux, iPhone, Firefox, and Safari mostly.

When we launched AyrMesh, I wanted to go with a more solid, commercial hosting provider. A friend recommended Media Temple, so I started with their basic "Grid" web hosting. The tools and interface are WONDERFUL! Their tech support is great, and, for simple web hosting, they have been very good. A few short outages, but, overall, very good. The caveat here is to note I said, "simple web hosting." Ayrstone.com has been on Media Temple's "Grid" service for a year now and has been flawless. Ayrmesh.com, however, experienced an outage for several hours one night. Something in the configuration went wrong in serving SSL pages; eventually, after I called and tweeted the support folks, they got it fixed. I was put on notice.

Some weeks later, it happened again. This time ayrmesh.com was down for about 5 hours, including a time when a reviewer was trying to install an AyrMesh system. Same mysterious problem, and no explanation from the support people that gave me any confidence that it wouldn't happen again. Apparently they just don't monitor the software that provides the SSL support for their web servers very well.

That, of course, was the last straw. The next day I rented a "Virtual Private Server" from GoDaddy (they seem to have the best deals on the web... of course, it's very difficult to compare apples to apples) and moved ayrmesh.com to it. We have had one short glitch for "scheduled maintenance" (they swear they sent me an email notifying me), but otherwise it has run perfectly.

So, for the moment, ayrstone.com is still running on Media Temple and ayrmesh.com is running on the GoDaddy server. There is plenty of room/resource on the server to move ayrstone.com there, but everything is working pretty well right now and I don't mind blowing $16 per month on Media Temple for now.

The next frontier: IP cameras. Here we step into the murky world of importing, and all the fun that comes with it. Stay tuned...